About Extel

Extel

Extel began in London in March 1872 as the Exchange Telegraph Company, created to distribute financial and business information from the London Stock Exchange and other commercial markets directly to subscribers. Over more than a century it grew into one of Britain's leading news agencies and financial information businesses, and its name, shortened to Extel in common use from the 1950s, survives today in the equity research rankings business that was revived under the Extel name in September 2024.

Few British media businesses can trace so long a continuous thread. The company that installed ticker tape machines in banks and gentlemen's clubs in the 1870s later produced the celebrated Extel company cards, ran a worldwide news service, passed through the ownership of United Newspapers, Pearson and Thomson, and finally saw its name restored by Institutional Investor Research as the brand for its survey and rankings operation.

Foundation in 1872 and the ticker tape

The Exchange Telegraph Company was created in March 1872 specifically to distribute financial and business information from the Stock Exchange and other commercial markets direct to subscribers. Its founding undertaking involved telegraph technology connecting London and New York, at a time when a transatlantic telegraph cable made it possible to transmit share price information between the two financial centres electronically rather than by ship.

The company's visible presence in the City was the ticker tape machine. It established ticker tape telegraph machines in offices, gentlemen's clubs and banks, providing those subscribers with a continuous stream of commercial information. In an era before telephones were widespread, let alone screens, a printed tape carrying prices and news into a subscriber's own premises was a transformative product: financial information no longer had to be fetched from the Exchange, but arrived continuously where decisions were made.

Expansion of services, 1876 to 1913

Extel's original financial service quickly broadened into general news agency work. It introduced a parliamentary service in 1876, reporting the proceedings at Westminster for subscribers. A general news service followed in 1879, and a legal service in 1891. Each addition moved the company further from a pure prices wire towards the model of a full news agency serving newspapers and other customers.

The business was successful enough that by 1906 it had opened ten branches outside London. It added a faster financial service in 1907, and in 1913 it began operating a worldwide news service. A separate sports service was included in the 1930s. By then the Exchange Telegraph Company occupied a position in British journalism comparable in kind, if not in scale, to the Press Association and Reuters: a wholesale supplier whose reporting appeared in publications across the country.

The Extel name and the Extel cards

The name Extel, a contraction of Exchange Telegraph, came into common use for the company in the 1950s. By that point the business had grown into one of the leading news agencies, a provider of financial information and the operator of associated businesses built around company and market data.

Its best-known product was the Extel card. First produced in 1922, Extel cards were described as the very first corporate snapshots, or tear-sheets: hard-copy cards carrying brief data on a company's profit and loss, its employees, its business activities and its executive management. Before electronic databases, these cards were a standard reference tool in the City, allowing investors, brokers and journalists to check the essential facts about a listed company quickly. The card concept, a standardised one-company summary, anticipated the company profile pages of modern financial data terminals, and the historical datasets descended from the cards remained commercially valuable long after the cards themselves ceased to be printed.

The Extel Survey

The other enduring Extel institution is its survey of investment research. The survey began in 1974, when independent consultant Geoffrey Osmint conceived the idea of collecting views and votes from fund managers on the services and advice they received from research analysts at stockbroking houses. The first survey, produced in October 1974, involved some 53 fund management firms; interest grew quickly to around 120 asset management firms.

For its first decade the survey was run independently by Osmint and sponsored by the American bank Continental Illinois. When that bank failed in 1985, the survey became the Extel Survey, continuing under Osmint's direction within the wider Extel business. In later decades participation grew enormously, with well over a thousand firms taking part in the survey's successor editions, and the annual rankings became a closely watched verdict on the quality of equity research and, later, of corporate executive teams and investor relations.

Ownership changes: United Newspapers and Pearson

Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, Extel was subsumed into various media groups, losing the independent identity it had kept for a century. United Newspapers acquired Extel in 1987. In 1991, Extel set up a joint venture with Agence France-Presse to create a financial news service, AFX News, combining Extel's City of London strength with the French agency's international reach.

Pearson acquired Extel in 1993 and merged it into its Financial Times division as Financial Times Information. Pearson later reorganised the business into two divisions, Market Data and Research, with the research division retaining the Extel branding. Extel's own institutional history acknowledges that this period inside larger groups reduced the business's effectiveness and distinctiveness, even as its data assets and its survey remained prized.

Thomson, Thomson Reuters and the survey era

In 1999 the private data company Primark acquired the Extel brand from Pearson, and in 2000 Extel became part of Thomson Financial. At around the same time, Thomson acquired the historical datasets descended from the Extel cards, together with the Extel Survey. Agence France-Presse's share in AFX News was sold to Thomson Financial in 2006, and in 2007 Thomson Financial, and with it Extel, was merged into the newly formed Thomson Reuters.

By this stage, and essentially since 1999, the only continuing commercial and operational part of Extel was the Extel Survey. The news agency that had once competed on parliamentary, legal, sports and worldwide wires had narrowed to a single, highly regarded product: the annual poll of fund managers and analysts that ranked research providers.

WeConvene, Institutional Investor and separation

The survey business changed hands again in the following decade. In 2016, WeConvene, a cloud-based corporate access platform, acquired Extel. In 2018 WeConvene sold the business to its larger competitor Institutional Investor, then owned by Euromoney, and the two survey operations were combined to form Institutional Investor Research, known as II Research. For a period the Extel name went dormant as a trading name, subsumed within the II Research brand.

In November 2022, Euromoney was delisted following its purchase by a private equity consortium, and II Research was separated from Institutional Investor as part of the resulting restructuring. That separation set the stage for the old name to return.

Revival of the Extel name in 2024

In September 2024, II Research rebranded, resurrecting its dormant trading name Extel. The revival was marked by the release of the 2024 Developed Europe and Emerging EMEA Executive Team research findings on 5 September 2024. Under the restored brand, the business describes itself as a provider of independent market intelligence and performance evaluations for the global capital markets, serving buy-side firms, sell-side firms and corporate issuers.

The modern Extel's surveys gather feedback from investment professionals on corporate leadership, assessing qualities such as credibility, communication, financial stewardship and capital allocation, and on the quality of investor relations, across more than twenty performance metrics. The 2024 Executive Team research recorded votes relating to 2,702 chief executives, finance chiefs and investor relations officers from 1,338 nominated companies, with 2,170 voters from 1,068 voting companies. Its fixed income research rankings that year drew responses from more than six thousand bond and credit specialists. The company presenting this work in 2024 traced its heritage directly to the Exchange Telegraph Company of 1872, noting offices in New York, London and Tokyo and a presence across Europe, Emerging EMEA, Asia Pacific, North America and Latin America.

Products and identity today

The Extel that exists today is therefore not a news agency in the nineteenth and twentieth century sense. It is a rankings and benchmark research business whose authority rests on the scale of its investor surveys. Yet the continuity is genuine: the survey it now publishes descends from the Extel Survey begun in 1974, and the brand it trades under was already famous in the City for the Extel cards and the Exchange Telegraph wires long before that.

The batch record for this directory lists Extel in London, England, which matches both its 1872 foundation in the capital and the London base of the revived business. Its current website is extelinsights.com.

Significance

Extel's significance in British media history is twofold. As the Exchange Telegraph Company, it was a pioneer of real-time financial information, taking market prices out of the Stock Exchange and into subscribers' offices by ticker tape, and it developed into a full news agency with parliamentary, general, legal, sports and worldwide services. As Extel, it set the standard format for the one-page company profile with its cards, and created in its survey one of the financial industry's most durable league tables of research quality.

The essential facts are these: founded in London in March 1872 as the Exchange Telegraph Company to distribute Stock Exchange information by ticker tape; parliamentary service 1876, general news 1879, legal service 1891, worldwide news 1913; Extel cards from 1922; the Extel name in common use from the 1950s; the Extel Survey from 1974 in its sponsored form and under the Extel name from the mid-1980s; acquired by United Newspapers in 1987, Pearson in 1993 and Thomson in 2000, passing into Thomson Reuters in 2007; the survey business acquired by WeConvene in 2016 and Institutional Investor in 2018; and the Extel name revived by Institutional Investor Research in September 2024.